Harvesting From Dry Soil: Black Women, Supper Clubs and Marketplaces as Economic Resistance
By Kimberly M. Parris
Supper clubs and marketplaces as a means of resistance? I think so.
Breaking into spaces traditionally uplifting those who are seen as the "majority" often means that women of color, Black women in particular, find themselves unseen, unheard, and under appreciated.
There’s an irony here, though: Black women often sit firmly at the intersection of ingenuity and culture, their contributions often not valued until they are repackaged by someone else.
It is all of this that makes the rise of supper clubs and vendor-driven food markets make much more sense. Both events allow for creative license, flexible work schedules, and economic feasibility on one’s own terms.
But resistance? Why resistance?
Aside from the work that I do here with Women for the Culture, I write a Substack blog that deep-dives into the intersections of food, culture, race and policy called At the Kitchen Table. One of my recent pieces explored the origins of fried chicken.
In that same piece, I covered what one might consider the first “supper club” — Black women waiter carriers who, during the Civil War, sold fried chicken dinners and desserts on trains passing through Gordonsville, a town in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The covered meals cornered a niche in the market, as the trains that passed through had no dining car, as well as provided the women with a much needed stream of revenue while their significant others fought in the war.
Throughout the decades, Black women have continually found ways to center their enterprising spirits, particularly as their abilities to raise capital for their own ventures proved challenging. The numbers support this: a 2021 demographic report by JPMorganChase noted that the number of Black women entrepreneurs grew by 13 percent, yet they receive less than 1 percent of business capital despite generating upwards of $60 billion in the economy.
A Wells Fargo report released this year not only confirmed JPMorgan’s findings, but showed that the number of Black women entrepreneurs has grown by an additional 13 percent year over year, as more than half a million Black women have become unemployed in the past year alone.
Whenever their backs are against the wall, Black women show up and remove the wall.
The framework of this (Black women creating the necessary out of the nonexistent) can be seen across the country. In New York City, Queens-based entrepreneurs Dianna Rose and Aleeia Abraham ran a Night Market series, highlighting Queens-based vendors, from 2020 to this past year.
Rose, who won the 2022 David Prize for her commitment to sustainable and healthy food ecosystems in NYC, and Abraham, founder of the Queens-based collective The BlaQue Resource Network, used their collective missions centered on empowerment, amplification, and economic impact, to create a marketplace that allowed local food vendors and other entrepreneurs to shine.
Between Rose’s work with food-centered businesses, and Abraham’s work amplifying Black-owned, Queens-based businesses, the pair have helped thousands of entrepreneurs through their individual and collective missions.
Further down the Eastern Seaboard, D.C.-based entrepreneur and activist Angel Gregario, started her journey with her unique spice shop, The Spice Suite, before expanding into a 7,500-square-foot retail hub called Black+Forth. The hub serves as a retail mall for multiple Black-owned businesses, including her own.
Her intent has always been to provide affordable and accessible space for fellow Black entrepreneurs to grow, especially Black women.
It is the perfect avenue to provide Black women in particular with retail space, often a highly sought-after commodity that requires capital.
Gregorio’s work with Black+Forth interrupts the cycle that often happens with Black women looking to grow, yet being stopped by the lack of access to capital. Prior to her larger retail space, she hosted thousands of businesses in The Spice Suite over the 11 years her business has been running.
This push for revolutionary approaches to Black empowerment and entrepreneurship doesn’t just stop at marketplaces and retail spaces. Culinary TV producer, storyteller, chef and author Courtnee Futch-Brinson took her love of words and food, and turned it into a sold-out national supper club tour.
Based in Atlanta, she launched her experiential dining approach through intimate digital portraits on social media and her With Love & Butter Substack, then slowly (or not so slowly, depending on your perspective) created The Brown Butter Supper Club, a family-style communal dining event that takes its guests through a multicourse dining story.
I had the opportunity to attend one of the first Brown Butter dinners in 2024 and was wowed by how Futch-Brinson used her food and specific culinary perspective to both tell a story and paint a portrait.
Today, that same supper club has earned her a feature in Essence magazine.
Over on the West Coast, we have Asha Starks, a name that is likely familiar to you... I’ve written about her here before. Her fish-fry-centered pop-up, Hot Grease, graces the intersection of food, community and Black American history, incorporating mutual aid through her “Potlikker Line,” a fund that centers families in need.
Even my own independent work as a professional chef reflects a similar thread of entrepreneurship and community. I started hosting pop-up dinners in 2018 while building my catering brand and working my way up through the ranks as a restaurant chef. Receiving no mentorship at the time, I was looking for a way to bridge my culinary story with my history while creating a sustainable, independent stream of income.
The journey yielded more than 10 successful, sold-out pop-up dinners with regional sponsorships from brands like Bartenura and radio stations like New York's famous WQHT-Hot 97. It eventually evolved into Salt + Soil, a seasonal pop-up dinner series rooted in the beauty, history and diversity of the food of the Black diaspora.
Resistance doesn’t always look like a physical battle. Sometimes, it looks like tilling dry soil and still harvesting a paradise.
It looks like Black women demonstrating the myriad ways they continue to thrive despite the odds stacked against them, all while creating space for others to thrive right alongside them.
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